Ros de Lanerolle | |
---|---|
Born | Jennifer Rosalynde Ainslie 22 January 1932 |
Died | 23 September 1993 | (aged 61)
Occupation(s) | Activist, feminist publisher |
Spouse | Accha de Lanerolle |
Children | 2, Indra and Ayisha |
Ros de Lanerolle (22 January 1932 – 23 September 1993),[1] also known as Rosalynde Ainslie, was a South African activist, journalist and publisher. Having settled in Britain in the 1950s, she campaigned actively against apartheid, and later became a pioneering figure in women's publishing in the UK, called by Florence Howe "the doyenne of feminist publishers".[2]
Jennifer Rosalynde Ainslie was born in 1932 in Cape Town, where she went to school and attended the University of Cape Town, before moving to London, England, in 1954[3] as a graduate student of English literature.[1][4] A radical socialist, she became increasingly involved with the politics of Southern Africa, and on a 1958 visit to Northern Rhodesia, hoping to meet South African trade unionists working there, she was taken into custody, declared undesirable, and deported.[1]
She became London representative of the anti-apartheid quarterly journal Africa South, edited by Ronald Segal,[3][5] and interacted closely with other South African exiles, including Ruth First, with whom she formed a close 20-year friendship.[6] De Lanerolle was a member of the Boycott Movement (others included Peter Koinange, Claudia Jones and Steve Naidoo) founded in London on 26 June 1959,[7] campaigning around the call by Albert Luthuli to boycott South African exports.[8] In 1960 she was a prime initiator, together with Vella Pillay and Abdul Minty,[9] of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) in Britain, and was its first secretary.[1][10][11] She wrote two important pamphlets, published by AAM: Unholy Alliance (1961), analysing the support that the British military and business community and government gave to the white-minority Verwoerd regime (the pamphlet was launched at a press conference in London in 1962 by Irish writer and diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien, who contributed the Introduction),[12] and The Collaborators (with Dorothy Robinson, 1964), revealing the intricacies of the financial politics of apartheid.[1]
In 1966, her book The Press in Africa: Communications Past and Present was published by Gollancz in London and Walker and Company in New York. She also did freelance editing work for Heinemann's African Writers Series,[1] acknowledged by editorial director James Currey as the "most important single person at this time" in the South African network.[13] She began working for Ernest Hecht's Souvenir Press in 1975, and in 1981 moved to the Women's Press (co-founded in 1977 by writer and publisher Stephanie Dowrick and entrepreneur Naim Attallah),[14][15] where she was managing director and commissioning editor, publishing authors including Rosalie Bertell, Alice Walker, Ellen Kuzwayo, Joan Riley, Caesarina Makhoere, Emma Mashanini, Tsitsi Dangarembga,[16] Ama Ata Aidoo, Merle Collins, Pauline Melville, Farida Karodia, and many others. As Helen Carr has observed: "The Women’s Press in Britain ... built up by Ros de Lanerolle, a South African who had earlier been much involved in opposition to apartheid, from the beginning had a policy of publishing work by black and what were then referred to as Third World writers."[17] She was a founder member of the Feminist Book Fair and helped found the organisation Women in Publishing (WiP), campaigning to improve the position of women in the book trade.[18] In 1992 she was awarded WiP's Pandora Prize for her contribution "to raising the status of women in publishing".[10]
De Lanerolle left the Women's Press in 1991 after a decade at the helm.[19] She was already ill when in 1993 she made the second of two visits to South Africa since her name was removed from the banned list; she was planning new publishing ventures that would be compensatory and beneficial to Black Africans,[1] and had launched her new company, Open Letters, with Alison Hennegan and Gillian Hanscombe as co-directors.[20][21][22] De Lanerolle was also a co-originator of the Orange Prize for Fiction by women.[10] At the time of her premature death from cancer in 1993, aged 61, she was "at the height of her career as a feminist publisher".[23]
In 1960, she married Sri Lanka-born Accha de Lanerolle,[24] and they had two children: son Indra[25] and daughter Ayisha.[1][26]